Paratrooper chef

Thierry Marx, an ex-soldier whose mother sells sausages, has held two Michelin stars and runs a haute cuisine restaurant in Paris.

Thierry Marx speaks softly and intently. While his controlled demeanor doesn’t suggest the sort of person who would lose his temper, you wouldn’t mess with this former paratrooper who is one of France’s leading chefs.

His head is shaved and he’s powerfully built. He’s focused and economical with his words. Does he shout in the kitchen? “Never!” says the chef who heads the new Mandarin Oriental in Paris, switching to English for a single emphatic word during an interview conducted in French.

 

It’s like hearing Marcel Marceau speak in Silent Movie.

“If you shout it means you are scared: It’s a big team here and I don’t want people to be scared,” he says. “We try to be well prepared. The military taught me leadership: How to use everyone’s skills, and not just in an emergency.”

Marx is less flamboyant than some of his peers, though he’s achieved celebrity status, appearing in a French version of the TV show Top Chef. He held two Michelin stars for more than a decade at Chateau Cordeillan-Bages, in Gironde, and was named Chef of the Year by Gault & Millau and by Le Chef in 2006.

“My cuisine is a play on texture and temperature,” he says. “I’ve been very influenced by Japan. So you play with the texture and temperature but you respect the product and it’s also really important that the diners enjoy the taste, that they’re comfortable with it. In Japan, it’s a real philosophy, not only cooking. The right question is: Do you cook because you want to give food to people or do you cook for the emotion? I cook for the emotion and also for the communication because when you cook for somebody it’s about personal spirit, not just providing food.”

At Marx’s flagship Sur Mesure at the Mandarin Oriental, two set menus are served at lunch: €75 for five dishes and €180 for 11. I’d recommend the 11. The standout plate was Oeuf eclate — cracked egg — where Marx seeks to represent the various flavours when cooking an egg. A deep orange slow-cooked yolk is overlaid with a slice of transparent jellified vegetable consomme, so it looks like a fried egg, which is accompanied by an egg-white cylinder, surrounded by herbs and peas and splashes of colour.

“For me, it’s important to show there’s no conflict between tradition and innovation, that you can have a very classical cuisine and yet, at the same time, very innovative, very creative,” Marx says. “In France, if you do something too modern, if you show too much audacity, it means that you have to accept a lot of criticism and it’s quite difficult to change what people think about cuisine.”

Marx should know. He says his parents are far removed from the world of gastronomy, and his mother runs a sausage-and-French-fries stand at a soccer stadium in the east of France. “For her, sausages and French fries are good and they don’t cost a lot of money.”

Marx, 48, comes from an unprivileged background, a family of Polish refugees. “I come from Menilmontant, in the north of Paris,” he says. “It’s not a wealthy area. Traditionally, it’s a working- class district and even today it’s not very beautiful. So it was important for me to show people who still live in the district that even if you come from places like this in France with work you can fulfill all your ambitions and you can succeed.”